The Future Will Be Decentralized

Charles Hoskinson is Chief Executive Officer at Thanatos Holdings, Director at The Bitcoin Education Project, and President at the Hoskinson Content Group LLC. Hoskinson is a Colorado based technology entrepreneur and mathematician. He attended University of Colorado, Boulder to study analytic number theory in graduate school before moving into cryptography and social network theory.

Hoskinson begins his talk by pointing out that there are two kinds of worlds: banked and documented and unbanked and undocumented. All countries fall somewhere on this spectrum and the quality of life improves as one gets more banked and documented.

Hoskinson gives an example of two people – each person represents about half of the world’s population. The first example is a man within the United States, this average man owns several assets, has a decent job history, and has many open contracts (all are documented). On the other hand, Ahmed represents the other half of the world. Ahmed lives in Afghanistan, he has some assets as well, all of his contracts are verbal, and currently is employed (none of these are documented). Hoskinson also adds that money transfers for Ahmed are 12 cents on the dollar – this is extremely high but the average around the world.

Hoskinson offers the blockchain as a solution to the problem that is a reality by half the world. He explains that bitcoin can extend beyond just a currency but could extend access to banking and documentation. He goes on to say, “If you’re going to store something like who owns what, you need that database to be secure, you need it to be tamper-resistant, you need it to be distributed. And the blockchain is a giant, distributed database—the best in the world. It’s a great place to store property rights, credentials, and other documentation. Once something goes in the blockchain, it can’t come out.”

In closing, Hoskinson says that bitcoin-related technology is about to revolutionize property rights, banking, remote education, private law and crowd-funding for the developing world.This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.